1/ As you sit home watching #COVID death counts spiral, please know the official @CDCgov guidance for coding COVID-related deaths is as follows: any death where the disease “caused or is *assumed* to have caused or *contributed to* death.” Confirmed lab tests are not required… pic.twitter.com/H4D6mcti3R

CDC Tells Hospitals To List COVID as Cause of Death Even if You’re Just Assuming or It Only Contributed

By C. Douglas Golden, Western Journal, April 4, 2020:

The problem with making informed decisions about coronavirus is that we don’t have a whole lot of data on it at the moment.

The data that we do have, meanwhile, could end up being terminally skewed, particularly the data that’s been coming out of China.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance on determining COVID-19 as a cause of death isn’t going to help those numbers.

Issued March 24, the guidance tells hospitals to list COVID-19 as a cause of death regardless of whether or not there’s actual testing to confirm that’s the case.

Instead, even if the coronavirus was just a contributing factor or if it’s “assumed to have caused or contributed to death,” it can be listed as the primary cause.

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, or ICD, has established the code U07.1 for death by coronavirus infection. There’s a secondary code, U07.2, “for clinical or epidemiological diagnosis of COVID-19 where a laboratory confirmation is inconclusive or not available,” according to the CDC guidance.

“Because laboratory test results are not typically reported on death certificates in the U.S., NCHS is not planning to implement U07.2 for mortality statistics.”

Therein lies the problem.

“The underlying cause depends upon what and where conditions are reported on the death certificate. However, the rules for coding and selection of the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID- 19 being the underlying cause more often than not,” the guidelines read.

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“COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. Certifiers should include as much detail as possible based on their knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory testing, etc.,” the guidance continued.

“If the decedent had other chronic conditions such as COPD or asthma that may have also contributed, these conditions can be reported in Part II.”

Author and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, one of the few well-known figures to question some of the statistics on COVID-19, questioned the new CDC guidelines as well:

1/ As you sit home watching #COVID death counts spiral, please know the official @CDCgov guidance for coding COVID-related deaths is as follows: any death where the disease “caused or is *assumed* to have caused or *contributed to* death.” Confirmed lab tests are not required… pic.twitter.com/H4D6mcti3R

2/ And, btw, other possibly relevant factors, like, oh, COPD, are considered secondary. The rules “are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.” https://t.co/o003zuLQHt

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force announced that they were expecting a death toll of between 100,000 and 240,000 from coronavirus.

In an article on Friday, The Washington Post said some experts didn’t think the White House’s prediction models were accurate. It wasn’t because those experts thought that figure was too high or too low: It’s just because they didn’t think there was enough data to determine a death range yet.

“We don’t have a sense of what’s going on in the here and now, and we don’t know what people will do in the future,” Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University epidemiologist whose work was used by the White House to determine the death ranges, said.

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